28 Days Later: Silent Earth of the Living Omega Dogs

Rating: Null/10 (19 August 2003)

During the first half hour of "28 Days Later" I was ecstatic. This, I thought, was precisely the way the "Resident Evil" movie SHOULD have been done. So engrossed was I in it's faux-low-budget style, I didn't even mind that it was just about literally another filmed version of Matheson's "I Am Legend" (previously adapted as "The Omega Man") crossed with Craig Harrison's "The Quiet Earth" (later adapted by Geoff Murphy under the same title). But then I started to get restless, noticing more and more James Horneresqe direct rips from "Dawn of the Dead", "Night of the Living Dead" and even the substandard "Day of the Dead". Yes, I slowly realized that this movie didn't contain a single, original thought. Add to this the incredibly senseless idiocy of the film's hero Jim, who repeatedly gets himself in inanely deadly situations only to escape through sheer dumb luck, and you get a stupendously infuriating movie.
Then there's the film's visual style. Though Boyle does allow the digital fluff to somewhat defile his otherwise impressively potent post-apocalyptic setting, some of the early zombie scenes were indeed undeniably effective. Unfortunately, though, he nauseatingly overuses that Saving Private Ryan shutter-strobe effect to cover the disappointing lack of actual gore scenes. He prevents us from getting a good look at anything, not unlike Paul Anderson did in his disastrous "Resident Evil".
In it's second half, the film suddenly turns into Peckinpah's "Straw Dogs", with Jim in the Dustin Hoffman role, defending his girlfriend Selena from sex-starved British soldiers, who surprisingly turn out the be the real villains of the film (incidentally, this also closely resembles Romero's underrated "The Crazies"). Now, despite the fact that Jim was earlier established as a complete and utter imbecile, he is somehow able to perfectly predict and control the behavior of the surviving zombies, which he uses as preposterous weapons against the soldiers. I kid you not! In the film's third half, we're actually supposed to be rooting for the zombies as they violently slaughter soldier after soldier, including uninvolved innocents who just happened to be serving with the three rapists. The ending is so eerily similar to "Straw Dogs" that I couldn't help being revolted (not by the violence, but by the plagarism and its implications, considering Peckinpah's original intentions). Plus, the British soldiers are complete idiots, actually deciding to leave the safe perimeter of their base and enter the woods JUST TO KILL JIM! Couldn't they have just shot him in a remote part of the base and added his body to the already existing pile of zombies? But that wouldn't have given him the chance to escape, would it?
Blech.